Firstly, this comes across as a very hard Brexit, so there will be clear costs and consequences both in the EU and in parliament, where many still favour a softer Brexit.

Secondly, the UK will face a backlash from businesses, who will struggle with less skilled and less motivated resident workers. This will certainly curtail growth and probably encourage businesses to relocate overseas, where there will be greater labour mobility. Also competition for the limited, resident, skilled labour will drive up labour rates, triggering cost-push inflation and making the UK less competitive in international markets.

Thirdly, it’s not clear how existing EU residents in the UK will be treated (and, of course, UK nationals resident in the EU).

Fourthly, the blatantly ‘Britain First’ policy may well encourage xenophobia.

One response

These observations by Dr Alf in this piece he brings us from the Guardian are correct and one can see further problems.

To begin with the public are not going to like the idea of doing the jobs that were hitherto done by unskilled migrant workers such as picking fruit and vegetables,working in factories,pack houses and under the iron tutelage of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon distribution centres.

Hoteliers will not take their businesses abroad so how the Government proposes to get sullen,lazy and unproductive British workers to do the work currently done by Eastern Europeans,to the same standard and speed is beyond me unless of course white flight from South Africa caused by Jacob Zuma’s policies bridges the gap.

In the public sector we have worker productivity levels of 30% which means 66 days of actual work on a 220 working day year (44 working weeks).

Currently we have a shortage of construction workers currently filled by Eastern Europeans and we have insufficient systems building capacity.

That means the housing shortage will worsen with no way to improve the situation.
In the past attempts by the Home Office to reduce immigration have failed and as a result we have 8 million illegal immigrants based on the number of notes and coins in circulation,the number of school admissions (often mid term) of undocumented children by undocumented parents and the amount of food sold in supermarkets which exceeds what the official population could possibly eat or drink.

Private sector worker productivity is 30th in the world and 20% behind the average for the G7 and 80% of UK bosses at Times 1000 and Mid Cap level are overpaying themselves whilst not investing,not selling ,not exporting and not delivering optimised shareholder value.

They set an appalling example and cannot get UK workers to raise productivity and because they won’t invest in robotics and automation like the Japanese we will get the worst of all worlds.

One of the reasons for lack of UK worker productivity is obesity driven by excessive alchohol consumption,overeating,lack of exercise,eating the wrong foods,too little sleep,laziness and low mood.

These problems can be dealt with but it is going to take a lot more than gentle persuasion and retraining to get it done fast enough to improve UK competitiveness in a timely manner.
May and the UK Establishment lack the cojones for the brutally frank conversations and remedial actions that are required and have so far kicked most sensible ideas into “the long grass”.

Neither the Government or the NHS have any proposals to even start a conversation about these matters let alone formulate concrete proposals to deal with this.
This is is why George Osborne and David Cameron always overruled May as Home Secretary and carefully turned a blind eye to all forms of immigration.

May and Rudd have no proposals either but hope to cut immigration using methods that will simply not work because of the ease with which bogus documentation can be obtained and spare NI numbers allocated from the 19 million currently available.
May and her bunch of also rans and no hopers need to go and be rapidly replaced with younger,more fleet of foot and telegenic operators in order for Dr Alf’s worst nightmares on this subject not to come true.